Here's a brain-teaser for you: why do so many techno-wizards at the cutting edge of “artificial intelligence” seem to be missing something – quite a lot, actually – when it comes to intelligence of the old-fashioned human variety?
Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency chap, is awaiting sentence for fraud, money laundering and campaign finance violations; board members of the epically valuable OpenAI have just sent their company into freefall; and dear old Elon Musk, never knowingly out of trouble, is up to his neck in an antisemitism row.
None of these people will struggle for money in the long run – they're not made that way, unlike the overwhelming majority of journalists – but reputational bankruptcy is not a pretty thing, even for those who don't give a flying fig what others think about them.
World Rugby is irrelevant to this Great Leap Forward, in both its “A” and its “I” senses. There is nothing “artificial” about the non-governing governing body: why would anyone in their right mind want to simulate such a messed-up by-product of power politics, puerile protectionism and public pratfalls? As for the “intelligence” bit, feel free to study the latest revamp of the international game and draw your own conclusions.
Yet while the union code remains an all-too-mortal pursuit, with its wide range of imperfections in plain sight, it has spent the last few years cosying up to technology with something more than a fly-by-night flirtation in mind.
Stuart Lancaster, who, to coin a phrase, “followed the science” during his time as England coach, had tech-minded support staff running around like uniformed baddies in a Bond movie. (Players referred to them as “the rats”, possibly because they were never more than six feet away from one of them).
One hire was the “marginal gains” specialist Matt Parker from British Cycling, whose arrival was presented as a blue-sky-thinking move that would put the national team ahead of the curve in the run-up to the home World Cup in 2015.
If Parker kept his processes under wraps, his new employers did something similar with him. We knew he was there, but as we never got to see him, we didn't know what he was up to. Which, from Lancaster's point of view, was the point.
When the hack pack finally caught up with the new guy, the following exchange occurred. “You must be finding rugby a bit more challenging than cycling,” your columnist suggested. “Why would that be?” “Well, pretty much everything in cycling is measurable: power outputs, pedal speeds, the whole caboodle. It's difficult to measure how a rugby player will react to a smack in the nose after five minutes.” Answer there came none.
Time for a quick digression. Some players react more positively than others to a bunch of fives and David Wilson, the Bath front rower who propped for England in that benighted global tournament, was one such. Agenial sort bordering on placid, he was sometimes thumped by one of his own teammates as a way of bringing out the best in him. Funny old game, eh?
Aserious side to all this has taken root, of course, and it goes by the name of the Television Match Official system. On the face of it, technology should be everyone's friend when it comes to establishing the facts of a matter (with the obvious exception of those who find themselves on the rough end of the evidence). In reality, there is less clarity, more confusion and a greater cacophony of protest now than we experienced in the long-lost days of one bloke and his whistle.
Will we give it up as a bad job, this Mission Control approach to decision-making where, if recent high-profile errors are anything to go by, the calls are being made by complete space cadets? Fat chance. Too many people have spent too much money developing this stuff to cut their losses and scarper. Indeed, technology's hold over sport is likely to increase a hundred-fold over the years we have left to us, off the field as well as on it.
Take the betting industry and its highly profitable sporting wing. For the moment, the setting of odds remains an imprecise science: if it were infallible, India would have won cricket's World Cup and Leinster would now be chasing a hattrick of European titles.
But if AI proves as intelligent as it threatens to be, we may find ourselves in a place where number-crunching, analysis-rich “robots” go beyond identifying favourites and outsiders by declaring with unchallengeable authority that one side CANNOT POSSIBLY WIN and setting the prices accordingly. Which will signal the end of the gambling industry and, into the bargain, sport as we know and love it.
A game of rugby without a sense of mystery is barely a game at all, yet there would have been less predictability about a performance of King Lear than there was about many of the contests in the recent World Cup pool stage. For proponents of AI, complete certainty is the holy grail. For lovers of the union game, it is the devil's work.
